MISSION

Founded in early 2011, Boys Be Good is an artist collective of gay men living in America, founded by artists Christopher CunettoandJason Edward Tucker. We are based in Washington, DC and are comprised of artists from all backgrounds and areas of the country working in a variety of mediums and disciplines. We originally formed in response to the emotionally and politically charged censorship of David Wojnarowicz’s work during the 2010 exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Through our creative work and intellectual curiosity, we hope to challenge the stereotype of “homosexual art” and seek to explore the impact gay art and culture have on broader society while encouraging change and creative mutation within these same realms. Hide/Seek was about one era of queer creativity, we are about the next. Our oeuvre will become a series of investigations into the crucial events, moments and thoughts that we collectively feel are inescapable in queer biography.

It is through our collective exploration of these common biographic and thematic milestones that we hope to connect with our community and offer poetic ruminations on what it means to be who we are, both collectively and individually. We will build and populate a diverse and strong platform for queer artists. We will exploit the multiplicity of ideas and diversity of experiences in the collective and our community to augment the strength of our ideas and vibrancy of dialogue. By focusing on these individual moments in queer life we aim to find and create new connections and theories inside that specificity, striving to create new intellectual and interpersonal connections.

We organize our work into individaully titled "movements". These movements encompass a variety of creative and academic work from exhibitions to zines to panel discussions and other forms of more unconventional programming, events and products. Every movement has associated work from collective members, as well as a zine that offers a platform for artists, writers and other creatives outside the core Boys Be Good contributors. This work addds to the dialogue inside the movement to which the zine belongs.